Sunday, 31 March 2013

by Riley Hansard Crabb

Theoretical physicists
are making continuous efforts to bridge the apparent gap between mind and matter. The
Jesuit-trained French philosopher, Descartes, claimed the gap was unbridgeable
and Western science has followed his lead for too long. Eastern science says
there is no such gap, and has said so for thousands of years. Now, physicists
like Fritjof Capra in his book “The Tao Of Physics”, are turning to the
writings of Eastern philosophers to prove that Western physics has bridged the
gap without knowing it!

One such physicist, Fred
Alan Wolf, outlines his effort in a brief article in the September 1985 issue
of “Omni” magazine, “Quan­tum Consciousness”; but instead of following the lead
of his teachers—East and West—and accepting the principle that mind precedes
and controls matter, he reasons that matter controls mind, and the emotions.

In enunciating the Law of
Indeterminacy years ago, the Ger­man physicist, Heisenberg, acknowledged the
supremacy of mind over matter. He told his students of the 1930s that the
experimenter is a part of the experiment, that his attention on it will affect
the outcome. This resulted in a wave of scepticism in the scientific world
then, but the recognized wave-particle duality of quantum physics confirms the
German’s inspired observation.

Wolf poses the question:
“When does an atomic object behave like a wave and when does it behave like a
particle? According to many quantum physicists the answer depends on whether
the object is observed. Unobserved the object appears to be spread out over
space as a wave, but the instant it is observed the wave collapses to a point
and behaves like a particle. The action of a simple observation ’causes’ a wave
to collapse, producing a par­ticle. But what kind of action is a simple
observation? Nobel laureates Eugene Wigner and Brian Josephson and many other
physicists, including myself, believe that it may be a fundamental event beyond
physics. We view it as an act of consciousness.”

But then he goes on to
claim that the action of consciousness is controlled by the particle behavior
of electrons in the brain “orchestrating the behavior of individual nerve cells
as they relay their chemical messages to one another. Iargue that the
wave-particle duality action of electrons, for example, could give rise to
feelings of loneliness, of ego and hatred.” I argue, as a student of
metaphysics, that waves of loneliness, of ego and hatred give rise to chemical
changes in the molecules of the body. “Similarly,” writes Wolf, “love and
feelings of compassion may be created by photons, particle-wave units of
light.” It seems to me that it would be just as proper to say that feelings of
compassion are waves of energy from the emotional or Astral world—what
physicists call the virtual state- creating photons or particles in the
physical, the actual state.

MIND an OUTGROWTH of QUANTUM PHYSICS

“Love and hate, success and
failure, violence and peace could be but manifestations of energy, of forces and atomic objects
flowing through our bodies, brains and minds as particles and waves. What we
call the brain,” writes Wolf, “is the particlelike behavior of our observations.
What we call mind is the wavelike behavior of atomic objects, invisible and
unobserved. Mind is then the outgrowth of the basic laws of quantum physics
together with the actions of the observer, which I believe are the acts of
conscious­ness.”

Fred Alan Wolf claims to
have studied the Cabala with an internationally acknowledged expert, Carlos
Suares. This is while Wolf was an associate professor of physics at the
University of Paris. If Suares taught him that mind is an outgrowth of matter I
am surprised, and disappointed; for that philosophy is characteristic of the
Left Hand Path. It is quite the opposite of another internation­ally
acknowledged expert, Professor Whitehead, who held the chair for Mathematics at
Cambridge. His cosmology assumed that physical events were the result of mental
events, with mind, not matter, as the basis of life. John Wilcox in his
excellent book “Radionics In Theory and Practice” (Herbert Jenkins, London,
1960) compares Whitehead’s positive philosophy with that of the late lamented
founder of Scientology, a prize pupil of that famous or infamous Cabalist of
the Left-Hand Path, Aleister Crowley.

“Conversely,” writes
Wilcox, “Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, an Ameri­can nuclear physicist, subsequently turned
his attention to psychol­ogy in the belief that mental events partake of the
same fundamental characteristics as physical events. Under the name, first, of
Dianetics and subsequently Scientology, Hubbard evolved a technique of
psychotherapy based on the methodology of mathematics and atomic physics with
which some remarkable results are said to have been obtained.”

One of the remarkable
results was that Hubbard obtained a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars
from thousands of devotees all over the civilized world, using scurrilous
business practices which made him persona non grata in many American states and
in foreign countries such as England and Australia. This is one of the major
reasons he made himself inaccessible to process servers by living on a yacht in
the Mediterranean for years, then returning incognito back into the United
States after his lieutenants had surreptitiously purchased the old Gen.
Harrison hotel in Clearwater, Florida.

We can see here the
results of particle-like behavior at work as described by physicist Wolf in the
Omni article: “In the quantum world, electrons suffer a paradoxical life.
Because of their particle behavior and their electrical repulsion, no two
electrons can ever occupy the same space. They are doomed to solitude. In their
wave-like guise, however, electrons are forever seeking their opposite par­ticle,
the positron, even though such a meeting would result in their destruction. The
electron’s electrical charge is a cry for the return to the void. It hopes and
fears to attract its opposite, its antimatter partner, the positron, in a dance
of death.”

Four Worlds of the Cabalist

The RETURN to the VOID

To the Cabalist on the
Right-Hand Path of love and service, the “return to the Void” is a return to the Father’s
House, “O* zero is Infinity: Infinite Power, Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Love. To
the Black Magician who says, “Evil, be Thou my Good”, the Void is the end,
total destruc­tion because of the depen­dence on the self-limiting cycles of
matter—and the inorganic beings who re­side in it, in some cases refuse from an
earlier cycle, in Theosophical terms the Moon Chain, whose physical planet was
Maldek. It was blown up by Evil Forces in an all-out atomic war about 700,000
years ago.

Rumors of the sud­den
demise of the Apostle of Quantum Conscious­ness, Ron Hubbard, were rife in
Southern California long before I left it in Sep­tember 1985. In fact his
oldest son went to court to get control of his father’s estate, but lost the
fight to the Los Angeles leaders of Scientology, who pro­duced evidence that
con­vinced the court that Ron Hubbard was still alive— though they could not
pro­duce Hubbard! Now they say he is dead, of a stroke, at his California
ranch, ac­cording to an Associated Press dispatch of Jan. 28, 1986, and that
“Mr. Hubbard left most of his estate to Scientology”. Two other facts are known
for sure. His surviving wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, is in jail for committing
crimes in his name against the U.S. Government and his younger son died of
mysterious causes in a Las Vegas hospital. He was found unconscious in his car,
without identification, on the Nevada desert, apparently on his way to visit
his older brother who was living at that time in the gambling capital. Police
finally traced the ownership of the car to Clearwater, Florida and Scientology,
but the staff there at first denied any knowledge of the young man who passed
on, alone, and for no discernible medical cause.

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Saturday, 30 March 2013

Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two
of the many early civilisations that declined apparently because they moved
onto an agricultural path that was environmentally unsustainable. Credit: cc by
3.0

The world is in
transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world
grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than
doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of
food.

Food is the new oil. Land
is the new gold.

This new era is one of
rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food
equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into
fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts.

On the supply side,
extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising
temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can
reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue
to spread, eventually bringing down our social system.

Can we reverse these
trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century
civilisation, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilisations whose
archeological sites we now study?

This tightening of world
food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century,
when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain
surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the
world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount
in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled
under U.S. farm programmes to avoid overproduction.

When the world harvest was
good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it
would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to
maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned
world crop shortfalls.

When India’s monsoon
failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat
harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant
stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price.

When this period of food
abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has seven billion.

From 1950 to 2000 there
were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such
as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. But
their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back
to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this
period one of the most food-secure in world history.

But it was not to last.
By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary
costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside programme.

Today the United States
has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land
that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be
quickly brought into production when needed are over.

Ever since agriculture
began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of food
security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to
make it to the next harvest but to do so with a comfortable margin. From 1986,
when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the annual world
carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption.

This safety cushion was
not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply
as world consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged
only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An unprecedented period of
world food security has come to an end. Within two decades, the world had lost
both of its safety cushions.

In recent years, world
carryover stocks of grain have been only slightly above the 70 days that was
considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock
levels must take into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures,
more extensive drought, and more intense heat waves.

Although there is no easy
way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related
threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating
chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a stock reserve equal
to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security.

The world is now living
from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth
in demand. Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with
the accelerated growth in demand, but they are having difficulty doing so.

Food shortages undermined
earlier civilisations. The Sumerians and Mayans are just two of the many early
civilisations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural
path that was environmentally unsustainable.

For the Sumerians, rising
salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise
well-engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and
thus their civilisation. For the Mayans, soil erosion was one of the keys to
their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilisations.

We, too, are on such a
path. While the Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our
modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating
record losses of soil from erosion.

While the decline of
early civilisations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends
such as deforestation and soil erosion that undermined their food supply, we are
now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion
in human history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of
aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally advanced
countries, and rising temperature.

Against this backdrop, it
is not surprising that the United Nations reports that food prices are now
double what they were in 2002-04. For most U.S. citizens, who spend on average
nine percent of their income on food, this is not a big deal. But for consumers
who spend 50-70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a
serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise
simply by spending more.

Closely associated with
the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of
hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry
people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of 792 million in 1997.
After that it began to rise, climbing toward one billion. Unfortunately, if we
continue with business as usual, the ranks of the hungry will continue to
expand.

The bottom line is that
it is becoming much more difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up with the
world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain stocks were drawn down a
decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot do so, we
can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will
intensify, and food unrest will spread.

We are entering a time of
chronic food scarcity, one that is leading to intense competition for control
of land and water resources – in short, a new geopolitics of food.

*Lester Brown is the
president of Earth Policy Institute. For further reading on the global food
situation, see Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity,
by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton: October 2012). Or read more here.

Food shortages could force world
into vegetarianism, warn scientists

A bull grazes on dry
wheat husks in Logan, Kansas, one of the regions hit by the record drought that
has affected more than half of the US and is expected to drive up food prices.
Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Leading water scientists have issued one
of the sternest warnings
yet about global food supplies, saying that the
world's population may have to
switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid
catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20%
of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to
just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water
scientists.

"There will not be
enough water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected 9
billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards
diets common in western nations," the report by Malik Falkenmark and
colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said.

"There will be just
enough water if the proportion of animal-based foods is limited to 5% of total
calories and considerable regional water deficits can be met by a … reliable
system of food trade."

Dire warnings of water
scarcity limiting food production come as Oxfam and the UN prepare for a
possible second global food crisis in five years. Prices for staples such as
corn and wheat have risen nearly 50% on international markets since June,
triggered by severe droughts in the US and Russia, and weak monsoon rains in
Asia. More than 18 million people are already facing serious food shortages
across the Sahel.

Oxfam has forecast that
the price spike will have a devastating impact in developing countries that
rely heavily on food imports, including parts of Latin America, North Africa
and the Middle East. Food shortages in 2008 led to civil unrest in 28
countries.

Adopting a vegetarian
diet is one option to increase the amount of water available to grow more food
in an increasingly climate-erratic world, the scientists said. Animal
protein-rich food consumes five to 10 times more water than a vegetarian diet.
One third of the world's arable land is used to grow crops to feed animals.
Other options to feed people include eliminating waste and increasing trade
between countries in food surplus and those in deficit.

"Nine hundred
million people already go hungry and 2 billion people are malnourished in spite
of the fact that per capita food production continues to increase," they
said. "With 70% of all available water being in agriculture, growing more
food to feed an additional 2 billion people by 2050 will place greater pressure
on available water and land."

The report is being
released at the start of the annual world water conference in Stockholm,
Sweden, where 2,500 politicians, UN bodies, non-governmental groups and
researchers from 120 countries meet to address global water supply problems.

Competition for water
between food production and other uses will intensify pressure on essential
resources, the scientists said. "The UN predicts that we must increase
food production by 70% by mid-century. This will place additional pressure on
our already stressed water resources, at a time when we also need to allocate
more water to satisfy global energy demand – which is expected to rise 60% over
the coming 30 years – and to generate electricity for the 1.3 billion people
currently without it," said the report.

Overeating,
undernourishment and waste are all on the rise and increased food production
may face future constraints from water scarcity.

"We will need a new
recipe to feed the world in the future," said the report's editor, Anders
Jägerskog.

A separate report from
the International Water
Management Institute (IWMI) said the best way for countries to protect
millions of farmers from food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia
was to help them invest in small pumps and simple technology, rather than to
develop expensive, large-scale irrigation projects.

"We've witnessed
again and again what happens to the world's poor – the majority of whom depend
on agriculture for their livelihoods and already suffer from water scarcity –
when they are at the mercy of our fragile global food system," said Dr
Colin Chartres, the director general.

"Farmers across the
developing world are increasingly relying on and benefiting from small-scale,
locally-relevant water solutions. [These] techniques could increase yields up
to 300% and add tens of billions of US dollars to household revenues across
sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia."

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Friday, 29 March 2013

For many years the thesis
of [my] blog has been: Our civilization is in its final century, and there
is nothing we can do to prevent its collapse. When I began writing
this, I was largely dismissed as a defeatist and a depressed ‘doomer’ (or
worse). As awareness has grown about the now-inevitable end of (a) cheap
energy, (b) stable climate and (c) the growth economy, there is a growing
acknowledgement that the collapse
scenario I have written about is at least conceivable.

This acknowledgement
tends to come from people fortunate enough to have the intellectual curiosity,
critical thinking ability, undiminished instincts, and time to study and learn
how the world really works (not how we are told it works by those powerful and
moneyed interests best served by denying the extent and potential impact of
these crises and prolonging as long as possible the current unsustainable way
we live). And to the extent those knowledgeable people find their way to this
blog, they tend to ask the same question:

If the collapse of
industrial civilization cannot be prevented, what should we do now?

In a way, much of what
I’ve written on this blog is an attempt to answer that question, without being
too presumptuous, and appreciating that there is no one right answer to it. My
answer: Liberate myself, from
civilization’s bonds and destruction, before it collapses on top of me.

Here’s what I’m doing to
that end:

1.
Understanding what is really going on now

The newspapers and the
other media, including most of the independent and progressive media, are of little help in this
regard. Here’s what I have written before about more useful reading:

Our world (like all
ecological and social systems) is inherently, staggeringly and wonderfully
complex, but everything we are taught about the world and how it works (in
schools, and in the mainstream media) is reduced to simplistic, mechanistic
terms. We continue to believe that “the environment” (something that is
portrayed as somehow apart from us) is just facing “problems” that need
“solutions” (political, economic, scientific, technological, or spiritual). In
complicated systems (like your car), “problems” can be fixed. But in complex
systems there are no problems, only predicaments, unintended consequences of
actions that cannot be undone.

Nature teaches us (if we
will only listen) that we don’t fix a predicament, we adapt to it. The reason
so many of our modern crises are so wicked and intractable is that they are not
problems, but predicaments, unintended consequences of (mostly) well-intended
human actions. To understand how the world really works, and how we can start
to learn to adapt to our modern predicaments, we need to understand complexity.

With that context, of the
need for adaptation rather than futilely chasing “solutions”, these are the books and articles
that have given me a better understanding of how the world really works and
what to do about it. Seven books, which I read in approximately this order,
have been the most illuminating:

1.Full House, by Stephen
J. Gould. The improbable emergence of humans on Earth.

2.Story of B, by Daniel Quinn.
A radical revisionist history of civilization, in fictional format, and an
explanation of how we got to where we are now.

3.A Language Older Than
Words, by Derrick Jensen. A dark explanation of the reason for the core of
grief at the heart of the modern age.

4.A Short History of Progess,
by Ronald Wright. Why all civilizations collapse. A survey of past civilizations’
savagery and short-term thinking. Jared Diamond but shorter.

5.Against the Grain, by
Richard Manning. Why Jared Diamond said monoculture agriculture was the
greatest mistake in human history, and what it’s come to now.

6.Straw Dogs, by John Gray.
While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for
those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce,
brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring about the next great
extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.

7.The Long Emergency, by James
Kunstler. What the near future will look like when this century’s looming
ecological, economic, political and resource crises begin to cascade.

I also regularly read the
blogs and other resources listed in the Post-Civ Writers section of my
Gravitational Community in the right sidebar. And of course I talk regularly
with people who have reached a similar understanding of what’s happening in the
world. As a result, I think I have a relatively solid understanding of our
current situation.

2. Acquiring
essential knowledge and abilities for living sustainably in community

As the collapse worsens,
large, centralized institutions (corporations, governments, universities, social services, banks
etc.) will start to fall apart, as their analogues did in previous dying
civilizations. As this happens we will need to re-acquire the knowledge and
skills of resilience and community-based, sustainable self-sufficiency. We will
have to reinvent local, small-scale institutions within our communities to do
all the things we now depend on large, far-away organizations to do for us.

The knowledge we will
need includes, first and foremost, knowledge about ourselves: Our strengths,
motivations, needs and personality traits. It also includes knowledge of what
we’re meant to do in this world, which entails knowing what we are uniquely
good at, what we love doing, and what the world needs now that isn’t being
provided, or at least not sustainably so. That kind of self-knowledge can’t be
learned in books: It requires experiment, exploration, research, discovery,
taking risks, just trying things. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out.
There’s a great Jessica Hische poster circulating on Google+ that suggests “The
work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing
for the rest of your life.”

Some of the skills we’ll
need are technical skills (like growing our own food, making our own clothes
and repairing things instead of replacing them), but more of them are ‘soft’
skills and personal and collaborative capacities that we were born with (like
curiosity), or which our ancestors learned just to get along in their local
communities (like presence, and empathy), but which we no longer learn in our
disconnected, fragmented, hyper-competitive society. I created the chart above
and this
downloadable checklist, to self-assess which of these abilities I have, which
I would look for in community partners, and which I aspire to acquire or
practice.

One of the critical
abilities on this list is the ability to learn. To acquire it, and to instill
it in our children, we may all need to deschool
ourselves and unschool them. I was fortunate enough to experience a year of
unschooling, but completely deschooling myself will be a lifelong endeavour.

When our economic systems
collapse, our investments, currencies and commodities will become worthless, so
I’m investing in learning instead.

3.
Reconnecting with the Earth, with my instincts and senses, with the place I
live and the other creatures who live there

Our civilization tries to
break the bond between us
and the natural world. We are taught that the “environment” is something apart
from us. Before I can really understand what is happening and what I can and
must do about it, before I can be ready to face the enormous challenges ahead
in ways other than denial and attempts to perpetuate the status quo, I need to
reconnect, to re-become a part of all life on Earth, to see just how empty,
meaningless and intolerably destructive our consumerist industrial civilization
really is. I need to become centred, aware, and outraged.

There are many ways to
reconnect, and each of us must find the way that works for us. Joanna Macy
teaches courses in reconnection, based on the principles of appreciation,
presence, and openness. Eckhart Tolle and Richard Moss describe
meditation-based ways to live in the Now, instead of being paralyzed by the
past or fixated on the future as so many humans have become. Derrick Jensen
talks about listening to the land. David Abram shows us how to rediscover the
spell of the sensuous by paying attention to the natural world until we just
melt into it, become part of it.

This is a long and
difficult journey. I’m still trying to find my own way.

4. Living as
sustainably and responsibly as possible

Here’s Keith Farnish’s
summary of how to do this,
which is advice I follow seriously:

Don’t buy anything that
you don’t need. If you have to buy something, remember the 4 R’s: Reduce,
repair, reuse and respect. Become vegan, or as near as you can to remain
healthy. Buy local. Eat simply. Reduce the energy used in your home to the bare
minimum. Change your behaviour to allow for this. Become energy independent.
Have fewer [than replacement level] children. Travel as little as possible.
Don’t fly. Don’t drive. Instead: walk, cycle, use the bus, go by train.

I could do better, but
I’m working consciously at it, every day. I understand that this is not enough
to make much of a difference, even if everyone in the world could and would do
so. But it is still necessary. I feel I must try to stop feeding the machine of
industrial civilization, and at the same time try to minimize my personal
contribution to the damage that civilization inflicts upon the world, as the
sixth great extinction of life on Earth continues to accelerate. I am striving
to become a model of a better, more responsible, more sustainable way to live.

5. Daring to
tell the truth, and showing others how to prepare for collapse

Talking about the
collapse of industrial civilization as inevitable, in “polite company”, takes courage. Most
people don’t understand, and don’t want to. They want to believe that the
future will be wonderful, that ‘leaders’ will fix what’s broken in the world.
As Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons explain, I have to get past the internalized
oppression that I carry inside me, the fear of saying and talking about what I
most care about, even though doing so makes me vulnerable and may expose me to
disbelief and even ridicule.

I have found it easiest
to begin by talking with others that seem to get it — people in the Transition
initiative, people living in intentional community and people living an
alternative culture lifestyle. But I’ve discovered that even these relatively
enlightened people don’t really grasp the speed, extent and inevitability of
collapse, and, as a result, are mostly clueless about what really needs to be
done. It’s easy to get disheartened, and to stay silent, complicit with the
inadequacy of our response to the cataclysm we have unleashed on this planet.

I am striving, through
this blog and in my daily conversations, to make the discussion of our
civilization’s inevitable collapse and the preparations we need to begin now to
equip ourselves and our children for a post-collapse world, part of mainstream
social discourse. I will continue to do so until a critical mass of people turn
off their TVs and stop listening to the propaganda and denial of the media,
corporations and politicians. I believe that the creation of the
self-sufficient communities we will need after collapse will only begin when we
are ready, in large numbers, to talk about it. I am not optimistic that this
will happen in time, but I have to try.

And recently, I am
beginning to have this discussion in a new light: Not the grim business of
surviving a long series of cascading crises, but the joyful business of
liberating ourselves from a way of living that has never been right for us, and
which has always been constraining, oppressive, debilitating, and horrifically
destructive to our world and to our souls.

6. Fighting
back against those destroying the Earth

I have met many of the
‘leaders’ whose actions
and organizations are destroying the Earth. I have met few who are doing so
intentionally. Many of my post-civ writer colleagues believe that if we’re
going to shake ourselves out of our complacency we have to get angry, have to
identify the perpetrators of destruction and confront them with all our energy
and will. I can’t sustain that kind of anger, but I have no illusions about the
fact that we are destroying this planet, so quickly and utterly that its
recovery to full health will take centuries, even millennia, after we’re gone.
And that destruction is causing unimaginable amounts of suffering.

My passion to reduce
suffering motivates me more than anger. So that’s the motivation I’m trying to
draw on, to put to work fighting back against the destruction.

The ways in which anyone
chooses to fight depend on their personal passions, energy, time and appetite
for risk. I’ve decided it’s important to avoid getting sucked into methods of
fighting that don’t work (petitions, writing letters, protest demonstrations,
and donations to environmental groups seem to me to be usually ineffective,
which is why I guess they are the most tolerated forms of activism). I’ve
decided it’s equally important that I not exhaust myself quickly (e.g. by
getting caught and arrested) — this will be a long fight.

We each must select our
own battles and what tactics we’re willing to use. I plan to do my part to fight
the Alberta
Tar Sands and factory
farming, but I’m not yet sure how I will do that. My sense is that I need
to meet and collaborate with others who have chosen the same battles. My sense
is that guerrilla tactics that capitalize on the vulnerability of
civilization’s massively centralized, globalized, hyper-efficient systems will
work better than direct confrontation or symbolic actions, no matter how well
covered or clever the latter may be.

What matters, I think, is
results — less destruction, less suffering, a less ghastly transition to a
post-civilization world.

7. Living
joyfully

Lately I have been
writing a lot about living more joyfully: Spending time with people I love in gentle, natural,
beautiful places. Filling my day with healthy, natural pleasures. Finding and
conversing with bright, informed, creative people. Learning to laugh, and let
go. Playing.

I don’t see this as being
at odds with preparing for civilization’s end. Just as I seek to be a model of
responsible, sustainable living, I also want to be a model of joyful living. I
want to show others that there is a better way to live, a way that does not
depend on consumption and acquisition and ownership of stuff for gratification,
for fulfillment, for pleasure, for joy. For all the material wealth it bestows
on a fortunate few, our civilization is too often a joyless place, a place of
endless insecurity, anxiety, envy and despair. The laughter I hear is mostly
forced, mean-spirited, alcohol-induced, and almost desperate.

Living a simple, joyful
life is not only exemplary, it is essential, I think, to keeping our sanity and
our energy in a world seemingly gone mad with acquisitiveness, escapism,
violence, war, competition, arrogance, fear, sadness and anger. We need our
wits, and our strength, for the challenges ahead.

.
. . . .

Liberation

All seven of these
actions — (1)
understanding what is really going on, (2) acquiring essential knowledge and
abilities, (3) reconnecting with the Earth, (4) living responsibly, (5) showing
and telling others why and how to prepare for collapse, (6) fighting back
against the destruction, and (7) living joyfully, are aspects of what I am now
calling my liberation from civilization.
They are analogous to seven steps one might go through to liberate oneself from
an abusive spouse or relative.

I feel for that reason
ambivalent about liberating myself from civilization. I have become dependent
on it. For most of my life I felt it treated me pretty well. Or maybe not — maybe it was just, like
an abusive spouse, psychopathically clever at convincing me it was good for me.
Part of me says liberation is scary.
Not ready to change yet.

But the other part of me,
responding to Gaia’s quiet and unwavering voice, cries out for liberation. I
long to be feral. As
anarchist writer Wolfi Landstreicher wrote:

In a very general way, we
know what we want. We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free
beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives
away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into
abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How
long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place
where our desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but
normally. We want to re-eroticize our lives. We want to live not in a dead
world of resources, but in a living world of free wild lovers. We need to start
exploring the extent to which we are capable of living these dreams in the
present without isolating ourselves. This will give us a clearer understanding
of the domination of civilization over our lives, an understanding which will
allow us to fight domestication more intensely and so expand the extent to
which we can live wildly.

This yearning to be feral
is something I feel every time I see a bird or wild animal, every time I
harvest and eat wild, raw, pure food, every time I walk in the woods, and every
night when I sleep outdoors, naked. It is a yearning to be free, free of a
civilization which, with the best of intentions, has abused me, enslaved me,
placed a veil between me and the natural world, as it has for everyone.

We can’t prevent
civilization’s collapse, but we can still make the world a better place as it
falls, and, despite our justifiable fears of the suffering its collapse will
surely cause (much as its awesome and brutal reign has) celebrate its fall, and
our liberation.

(this article is an
attempt to shorten, personalize and update my signature post A Framework for
Personal Action)

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